May 20, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
That Royal Wedding, Reverend
Michael Curry, and the End of England
Friends,
Like
many Southern boys growing up in the 1950s, I recall fondly my father reading
stories to me of the great General “Stonewall” Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley,
of Colonel John “Gray Ghost” Mosby [remember the short-lived television
program?], and of Marse Robert Lee who led Confederate armies during the War
for Southern Independence.
But
I also reveled in the exploits of noble knights and cavaliers of old, heroic
monarchs of Europe leading their armies and peoples in great crusades; I was
held spellbound by the courageous exploits of Jean de Valette at the Siege of
Malta by the Turks and Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto. I imagined myself on the
walls of Vienna in 1683 awaiting the fateful charge of King John Sobieski’s
Winged Hussars to destroy the armies of militant Islam. I could visualize Lord
Nelson at Trafalgar, or Wellington on the field of Waterloo against that “disrupter
of Europe,” Napoleon. There was a seamless connection—a direct line, it seemed—linking
those great champions with the Southern heroes I grew up with.
In
addition to the military brilliance these gentlemen soldiers
exhibited, there was something else, something even more elevated, something
that my mentor the late Dr. Russell Kirk called the “moral imagination,” a
quality of character that integrated a discerning, reverent and appreciative
view of life and of history with the annealing power and legacy of our Western
Christian civilization and the traditions which they defended. They incorporated those
elements not only into their actions but into their very being. Like countless generations
before them, they received that inheritance as a kind of “unbought grace” solemnly
deeded to them by their ancestors, and, as such, a continuation of a
civilization that came into existence with Constantine’s vision—“In Hoc Signo
Vinces”—at the Milvian Bridge (312 A.D.) and the Christianization of the old
Roman Empire.
Drawing
from three ancient capitals of wisdom and belief—from Rome, Athens, and
Jerusalem—what became “Christendom,” re-sanctified by the anointing and coronation of the Emperor Charlemagne at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome by Pope Leo III in 800 A.D. and despite plagues, famine and religious
wars, remained a real and accessible model and guide for the inheritors of that
civilization and culture for well over 1,000 years. It held up first and
foremost the Faith as the necessary beacon and as essential for all men. It set
boundaries and dictated manners and a standard of allocution and communication,
it instructed our ancestors on what it was to be a true Christian gentleman,
and it was the source and nourishment of the greatest and most sublime culture
in all of history, producing great art, architecture, music, literature that
glorified God and through that glorification and through the belief of the
Faithful truly defined what it was to be elevated as “children of God” above
the lower brutes.
Integrally
a part of this historic Christian vision was the idea of kingship, of monarchy
and royalty, as incarnating a special role and obligation for him who not only
led his people and country, but also represented it in his very person. It was
St. Thomas Aquinas who in his works De
Regimine Principium (On the
Government of Princes, 1265) and De
Regno (On Kingship) summarized
the weight of history and millennia of experience that what he termed a “temperate
monarchy” was the most ideally suited form of government for most of mankind
(allowing, of course, for aristocratic republics in Venice, Genoa, and later in
America). By that he did not mean the modernist conception of an absolutist dictator
who simply bore the title of “king.” His description was much more nuanced,
including significant elements of what we would call today “representation”
of the different strata and segments of society. A temperate monarchy was not
at all incompatible with regionalism and regional autonomy, reflecting diverse
customs and traditions. Nor was it antithetical to elections if those elections
would reflect the influence of families and corporate and professional
organizations—those real building blocks of society.
It
incorporated the “father” figure, a paterfamilias,
grounded in the very laws of nature and in the history of each commonwealth.
That “father” ruled under laws given by God Himself, Divine Positive Law, and
he was bound strictly by those laws and the precepts of the Church. His primary
duty was to the good of the commonwealth, to the “family” that composed his
realm—modeled on the God-given and sanctioned nuclear family itself. The
commonwealth was, in this sense, the nuclear family writ large.
St.
Thomas was not the only medieval author to discuss forms of government and the
significance of monarchy in the history and development of Christendom. One can
cite the Englishman John of Salisbury in the 12th century, Vincent
of Beauvais’s On the Moral Education of a
Prince (ca. 1259), and various others, each in a sense reaching back to
Aristotle and to both the wisdom and experience of the ancients and to the very
Kings of Judah.
Like
the father of the household, the monarch was responsible for—had the sacred
duty of—insuring the common good and assuring that justice was properly and
wisely meted out for his people. And as he represented his “family,” he also had
the obligation to serve as exemplar and symbol for his people. Thus, in much of
Medieval and Renaissance literature we hear the monarchs of various lands
called simply by the names of those lands---“What will England [e.g, King Henry
V] now do?” “How shall France [e.g., King Louis] react?”
And
despite all the vicissitudes and disasters of war, famine, plague, religious
conflict, and revolution, the monarchical principle survived more or less in
tact into the bloody twentieth century—past the Protestant Reformation, past
the horrid Cromwellian interlude in England, past even the French Revolution
and its bastardized children of the nineteenth century. And even the Soviets
could not snuff it out, despite their best efforts.
Yet
what revolution and war, assassination and the triumph of liberalism could not
do, contemporary monarchy seems intent of doing to itself.
And
the most recent and searing example of this came at the wedding of English
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Years ago when I was a graduate student in Pamplona, Spain, one of my closest friends
(who aided me tremendously in the research for my doctoral dissertation),
Ignacio de Orbe y Tuero, Baron de Pardinas de Montevilla (d. 2006) and grandson
of the great Spanish Traditionalist general Juan Nepomuceno de Orbe, Marquis of
Valdespina, summed up the role of monarchs and monarchy in the modern world:
“Most of
Europe’s kings no longer have thrones,” he declared. “But they, like those who do, have a
special role and that is to keep alive the ancient traditions and legacy they
inherited, not to bend to the current fashion or opinion of the moment, to
stand apart and remind this generation—and the next—of the history and
continuity they represent. In this they comply with their solemn duty as
inheritors of a sacred and Christian inheritance and trust. They must remind us
of not only who we have been but what we can be. They are increasingly a ‘sign of
contradiction’; this must be their role in our world. If they fail in this—if they
embrace all the tawdry excesses and excrescences of our times—they will
forfeit that historic role, and rightly so.” [my
translation of a letter to me, September 1974]
In
December 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated as King of England, basically over
his love for an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, something deeply frowned on
and disapproved of back then—yet scarcely forty-five years later the heir
apparent to the English throne, Prince Charles, married Lady Diana Spencer, a disastrous
matrimony that would assist immeasurably in discrediting the House of Windsor, which
had already begun a decline many years earlier.
But
like most current ruling monarchies today, the catch phrase is “relevance,”
getting “with it,” so to speak, with all current fads, breaking with tradition,
basically turning a backside to the past and its critical importance in the
survival of the nation. And if that means bringing in a flamer like Elton John
and inviting a whole slew of remarkably disreputable Hollywood types, not to
mention pseudo-celebrities like Oprah Winfree, into the great halls and chapels
that once beheld the noble figures of a King Charles the Martyr or Victoria
Regina, then so be it.
And
then there was the ungracious spectacle of the “Presiding Bishop,” Michael
Curry, of what is called the Episcopal Church in the United States. Curry a few
years back was the Episcopal bishop in North Carolina, and distinguished himself
for his leftwing social and religious views—he would much rather preach the
gospel of “Saint” Martin Luther King than St. Paul: too many inconveniences and
prohibitions in the Pauline message!
And
he did not disappoint in St. George’s Chapel: jumping around like a
jack-rabbit, pretending he was sermonizing to a group of illiterate Yazoo bayou
dwellers in Mississippi, he brought, as admiring Fox commentators Shepard Smith and airhead
Ainsley Earhardt fawned, “a wonderful and inspiring American element” to the
wedding. [Where, pray tell, does Fox get all those brainless blondes from?]
For
thirteen minutes he basically said just one sentence: “How great is love!” But
he managed to mix in bits of MLK (yeah, King was an expert on conjugal love!),
civil rights, and a social gospel totally extraneous to the supposed occasion.
The
Windsors, for the most part, set stony-faced, enveloped by the tide of nonsense
and relevance that has overwhelmed them. Oh, certainly, it was said that the
ceremony “combined the best of British tradition with a new and fresh ‘American’
approach.” But what it actually did was
point out sharply the truth of my friend Ignacio de Orbe’s observation about
monarchy and monarchs in the modern world: “They
are increasingly a ‘sign of contradiction’; this must be their role in our
world. If they fail in this—if they embrace all the tawdry excesses and excrescences of
our times—they will forfeit that historic role, and rightly so.”
Our
world is perishing for the lack of heroes, for the lack of those Don Juans of
Austria, for those new and courageous Stonewall Jacksons and King John
Sobieskis who would stand manfully against the onrushing tide of Modernity and
decay in our civilization. The awe and reverence, the understanding that the
past is never really “past,” that it is always potentially within us, and that it can inform our steps and continue to inspire
us and anneal us in its grace, is a precious legacy, an invaluable gift from
our ancestors and Christendom. We forfeit it, and the blackness of despair and
death awaits us.
When
the traditional champions of our culture and civilization quit the field, as
the Windsors have done, only Evil—the “rough beast”—smiles.
Who but a Christian Southern historian could articulate this for us?
ReplyDeleteI'd like to print, frame, and hang this on my wall. Thank you so very much.
ReplyDeleteMr. Cathey, what do you think of those conservative/libertarian people who praise MLK as a hero for being against the vietnam war?
ReplyDelete